Recently, I have posted that the top-tier Japanese Baidu domain name was registered by another company in Japan, now Baidu Europe and even Korea, their targeted market were also been registered by someone else. Is this the act of cybersquatting? Though we believe the freedom of the Internet, but what’s the implications of the aforesaid conduct for the Internet and the company itself?

Source: http://baidu-europe.eu/?p=services (accessed on 6 May 2007)

Source: http://baidu.kr/ (accessed on 6 May 2007)

Ning has started off very well since its beta launch recently. In fact, I didn’t mentioned Ning before in Tag Edge. However I truly believe that it was a feature-rich web application that enable anyone in building a fully customize social network with different web services in minutes. The best part of using Ning is the users can create their social network without the required of any programming languages or design skills. The Ning users can also use their own logos, domain names, customize the CSS and HTML, and etc. in their social networks, as listed in Ning’s developer documentation and advanced customization page.

The other day I came across a post written by its CEO Gina Bianchini, she said the Ning name was derived from a Chinese word, i.e. peace in Chinese. Ning, pinyin as 宁. Peace in Chinese is 安宁 or 宁静, the meaning for peace or quiet respectively. It make sense that own a good and short domain name is very important for a new startup. Just as I mentioned in my another post that explained why The Venice Project has changed to the name of Joost. Or you wonder some people in China has attributed the success of Baidu was due to its Baidu’s name, a poem written during the Song Dynasty, according to this web page.

I truly believe the success of a web 2.0 has been the technology, people, and culture. These elements are important, of course, but before they start-off, a good and with distinct meaning domain name will bring them luck factor and because of that their users have created over 22,000 networks in five weeks. Sorry if I over-exaggerated the power and myth of a domain! This also well explained why they changed the original name from 24 Hour Laundry to Ning.

A domain registrar RegisterFly has lost its accreditation with ICANN on 16th March this year. “Terminating accreditation is the strongest measure ICANN is able to take against RegisterFly under its powers. ICANN has been frustrated and distressed by recent management confusion inside RegisterFly, I completely understand the greater frustration and enormous difficulty that this has created for registrants.” Dr. Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN said on this anouncement. In the announcement, ICANN also stated that they have immediately terminated RegisterFly’s right to use the ICANN Accredited Registrar logo on its website. Moreover, between now and 31 March RegisterFly is required to unlock and provide all necessary Authinfo codes to allow domain name transfers to occur. Any and all registrants wishing to transfer away from RegisterFly during this period should be allowed to do so efficiently and expeditiously. However, as I visited the landing page of RegisterFly, it seems that they did not updated their website for quite some times and the ICANN logo is still exist on there at the time of writing.

There are chaos surrounding RegisterFly before the above termination notice has been taken by ICANN. This was leading to the set up of a website, RegisterFlies to serve the angry customers and from there you will read a lot of depress comments written by the RegisterFly customers. Ironically, RegisterFly, a domain registrar based in New Jersey has only became a ICANN-accredited registrar barely a year ago and previously was a reseller for eNom. eNom is the second-largest domain registrar in the world and has recently terminated RegisterFly’s reseller status last month.

I think Microsoft will soon planning to release the beta version of Windows Seven after the recent launch of Windows Vista. Why Microsoft named it as Windows Seven, I guess it follows the NT 4, NT 5, i.e. Client: Windows XP, NT 6.0, i.e. Client: Windows Vista, the forthcoming will be NT 7.0 or Windows Seven (7.0).

As I check the domain registrant organization for WindowsSeven.com and WindowsSeven.net, the domain contact information has been in private status in order to keep out of the public eye by the registrant. But I guess Microsoft was the registrant for these two domain names and as usual, the registrar Microsoft was using is the company that called REGISTER.COM, INC.

For the whois records of WindowsSeven.com.cn and WindowsSeven.cn, I found the following information:

Domain Name: windowsseven.com.cn
ROID: 20050402s10011s08059369-cn
Domain Status: ok
Registrant Organization: Microsoft Corporation
Registrant Name: Domain Administrator
Administrative Email:
Sponsoring Registrar: Register.com
Name Server:ns2.msft.net
Name Server:ns5.msft.net
Name Server:ns3.msft.net
Name Server:ns1.msft.net
Name Server:ns4.msft.net
Registration Date: 2005-04-02 02:26
Expiration Date: 2007-04-02 02:26

Domain Name: windowsseven.cn
ROID: 20050401s10001s04202605-cn
Domain Status: ok
Registrant Organization: Microsoft Corporation
Registrant Name: Domain Administrator
Administrative Email:
Sponsoring Registrar: Register.com
Name Server:ns1.msft.net
Name Server:ns5.msft.net
Name Server:ns2.msft.net
Name Server:ns3.msft.net
Name Server:ns4.msft.net
Registration Date: 2005-04-01 22:32
Expiration Date: 2007-04-01 22:32

Bottom line: Whatever inside the Windows Seven, one thing for sure, it is proposed to usher in the next generation of the operating system.

I previously have posted a post on The Venice Project. The Skype founders have officially renamed The Venice Project to Joost. It is not surprise for me that the founders of Skype, i.e. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, the duo that brought the world Skype and Kazaa, have chosen a name that is also 5-letter words for their new online-video start-up. According to an article from the cnet, they chose Joost because they like the ring of it. However, some blogs I read are all wondering why they have changed its original name from theveniceproject to Joost. These people are worried that the name changed would affected the goodwill that the venice project built for the past months. My own view is: When I looked back all the three companies the duo built for the past years, they tend to used the “5-letter words” as their new venture’s name. I’m thinking whether they tend to believed that 5-letter words does bring their new venture the luck factor. In today’s world, I know it’s childish and absolutely ridiculous to make a comment on this, but it’s still no harm if they selected a shorter name as the final name for their dot com startup and since most of the well-established players such as sun, google, hp, msn, ask, just to name a few, they all have a short name. And I wonder the luck factor really take a major role on a new startup when there’s so much uncertainty in the market right now.

Simply put, I really like their idea. I wish them good luck.

Update: I deleted a paragraph that I believed was out of the topic being discussed here. I made a mistake. Sorry for any inconvenient caused.

Update 2: I put a screenshot below that I found on the Joost web page. I think it will well illustrate the feature-rich of Joost.

Source: http://static.joost.com/screenshots/J_08blog_Nettwerk_overlay.jpg

At first, I read a news on January 5 that talked about some 10,000 domain names lost due to the disruption caused by the Taiwan earthquake.

From this article, the China International Network Information Center said about 10,000 Chinese users were unable to update data about their dotcom domain names and failed to re-register on expiry of their domain times.

But a recent update on this story from another article is China’s domain name managers and Internet service providers refuted on Friday recent media reports about the loss of domestic domain names.

My view is that which news is indeed, a true story is no longer important here. The most important is for the domain holders, we must act proactively in protect the domain names we owned by renew the domain name before it goes expires, and this is not just about a good practice, it’s a responsibility to the readers and the users as well.

Blogger.com, a famous blogging software has released a new feature to all of its users. According to this post, it would allowed all of its users that carry the sub-domain of BlogSpot, i.e. example.blogspot.com to have their own domain name in their blog address. Most interesting is, this domain forwarding is free provided by Blogger and the existing sub-domain, i.e. http://example.blogspot.com will still exist on the web. However, the users must configure the DNS server setting by themselves. The method is quite simple as explained by Blogger’s help page, from this page:

To take care of this, you need to create a CNAME record for your domain with the DNS, associating your domain with ghs.google.com. The exact procedure for doing this varies depending on your domain registrar.

Once you’ve told one particular DNS server about your new domain, it will have to transfer that information to all the other servers on the internet, which could take a couple of days. So be aware that your new domain won’t necessarily be working instantly.

My view is that this is a lock-in strategy deployed by Blogger in order to prevent its users from switching to other blogging platforms. I’m not surprised of this tactical move by Blogger, as my previous post, entitled “Google become a domain name reseller“. I knew Google would made use of its database by trying to promote the domain name services to its existing users sooner or later.

Frankly, I’m a bit of surprise when I came across this news from Red Herrings that talked about Google is getting into the domain business. From this article:

Google has signed an agreement to resell website addresses held by domain name registrar services GoDaddy.com and eNom.com. Registration has been integrated in Google Apps for Your Domain and the registration fees are $10 annually. The service will support .com, .org, .net, .biz, and .info domains. In addition, it also includes the ability to create an administrative account to manage the site and a configuration tool to ensure the Google Apps is available on the new site.

My sense is that Google’s way of conduct domain name business is so similar to Yahoo! Domain. During registration of a new domain, a user need to open a Google account as this is comparable to open a Yahoo! Email as required by Yahoo! Domain. But the difference between these two resellers is Google resell a domain for $10 that include private registration while Yahoo! Domain do not. A user need to pay extra $9 per year to Yahoo! Domain’s partner, Melbourne IT to order to keep his/her contact information hidden from the public whois database.

My question is why Google gets into the domain name business? Is Google planning to tap into their search audience and make some money from it? Or Google is initiate a portal business that comprise of domain name registration, web hosting packages, online merchant, as we know Google has launched its Google Checkout. However, in this domain name matter, I still insist one must register a domain name through an ICANN registrar, not through a reseller, no matter how conveniently the registration process offer.